"IS ANYBODY PAYING ATTENTION?" The mindful view of an educated Buddhist blogger who uses critical thinking, evidence, facts, and investigation to come up with his opinions instead of fear based ideologies.

Wednesday, December 30, 2015

Sunday, December 27, 2015

In response to the post of one K C Caulder on Facebook, since he doesn't allow for replies on his page, this is what I am posting on my blog. My rebuttal, based on fact checking and I will cite my sources for the information.
1. First President to be photographed smoking a joint.
(He wasn't photographed smoking a joint while in the office of president and he wasn't the only one who has admitted to smoking pot. Check the drugging and drinking history of G.W. Bush before shooting your mouth off, and the burden of proof is on you for this one.)

2. First President to apply for college aid as a foreign student, then deny he was a foreigner.
(This is a total lie and this birther crap is getting monotonous. http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/birthers/birthcertificate.asp )

3. First President to have a social security number from a state he has never lived in.
(Also, the burden of proof is on you for this wild claim.)

4. First President to preside over a cut to the credit-rating of the United States.
(The president doesn't do that, congress did. Republicans in House of Representatives refused to raise the debt ceiling until it ended in our credit rating change.)

5. First President to violate the War Powers Act.
(Total bullshit because it was checked by politifact and proved false. http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2011/jun/22/are-us-actions-libya-subject-war-powers-resolution/ )

6. First President to be held in contempt of court for illegally obstructing oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.
(Prove one instance, please, your claim, your burden of proof.)

7. First President to require all Americans to purchase a product from a third party.
(Boo hoo, we had to buy health insurance that we needed anyway at affordable prices, WAAAAH! again bullshit.)

8. First President to spend a trillion dollars on "shovel-ready" jobs when there was no such thing as "shovel-ready" jobs.
(The reinvestment and and recovery act money was distributed to each state but in some Republican controlled states, they hired contractors from out of state that were friends of theirs and worked on parts of town where the roads didn't need repaired, and workers stood around doing nothing instead of what they were contracted to do and NO ONE REGULATED the contractors as was suggested. Also, if you live in Republican states like Texas, your governor refused the stimulous act money so you didn't get the jobs you were expecting because your governor doesn't care about you more than he does about political drama.
http://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/02/17/economic.stimulus.2010/ )

9. First President to abrogate bankruptcy law to turn over control of companies to his union supporters.
(Total fiction, if someone can even find something closely related to this, please message me.)

10. First President to by-pass Congress and implement the Dream Act through executive fiat.
(The dream act is still in it's proposal stage and never got implemented because it was shot down by Republicans in congress. http://politics.nytimes.com/congress/votes/111/senate/2/278 )

11. First President to order a secret amnesty program that stopped the deportation of illegal immigrants across the U.S., including those with criminal convictions.
(This is he all time stupidest rants I have heard yet. If it was a secret amnesty act, tell me how your ignorant ass in Texas heard about it, are you on a Senate committee that had private information on this?)

12. First President to demand a company hand-over $20 billion to one of his political appointees.
(This is so ridiculous, this is like the total list of major lies already debunked on Snopes.com. It wasn't impossible to find this information, all I had to do was type this into Google and this came up, the entire list debunked with sources cited. http://www.mythdebunk.com/obamas-presidential-firsts/ )

Thank You, Myth debunk, I would have wasted my day posting the answers to the rest of these, out of frustrations.

13. First President to tell a CEO of a major corporation (Chrysler) to resign.
14. First President to terminate America’s ability to put a man in space.
15. First President to cancel the National Day of Prayer and to say that America is no longer a Christian nation.
16. First President to have a law signed by an auto-pen without being present.
17. First President to arbitrarily declare an existing law unconstitutional and refuse to enforce it.
18. First President to threaten insurance companies if they publicly spoke out on the reasons for their rate increases.
19. First President to tell a major manufacturing company in which state it is allowed to locate a factory.
20. First President to file lawsuits against the states he swore an oath to protect (AZ, WI, OH, IN).
21. First President to withdraw an existing coal permit that had been properly issued years ago.
22. First President to actively try to bankrupt an American industry (coal).
23. First President to fire an inspector general of AmeriCorps for catching one of his friends in a corruption case.
24. First President to appoint 45 czars to replace elected officials in his office.
25. First President to surround himself with radical left wing anarchists.
26. First President to golf more than 150 separate times in his five years in office.
27. First President to hide his birth, medical, educational and travel records.
28. First President to win a Nobel Peace Prize for doing NOTHING to earn it.
29. First President to go on multiple "global apology tours" and concurrent "insult our friends" tours.
30. First President to go on over 17 lavish vacations, in addition to date nights and Wednesday evening White House parties for his friends paid for by the taxpayers.
31. First President to have personal servants (taxpayer funded) for his wife.
32. First President to keep a dog trainer on retainer for $102,000 a year at taxpayer expense.
33. First President to fly in a personal trainer from Chicago at least once a week at taxpayer expense.
34. First President to repeat the Quran and tell us the early morning call of the Azan (Islamic call to worship) is the most beautiful sound on earth.
35. First President to side with a foreign nation over one of the American 50 states (Mexico vs Arizona).
36. First President to tell the military men and women that they should pay for their own private insurance because they "volunteered to go to war and knew the consequences."
37. Then he was the First President to tell the members of the military that THEY were UNPATRIOTIC for balking at the last suggestion.
I feel much better now. I had been under the impression he hadn't been doing ANYTHING... Such an accomplished individual... in the eyes of the ignorant maybe.!.

I am a member of the 12 step program and I am open about that. I am in recovery for over 26 years now. In the beginning, I was told to pray. I didn't know who I was praying to. I was told to pray to God as I don't understand him and that has worked for me for over 26 years. I was in meetings listening to people who said that the more time you pray and meditate (deepest form of prayer or listening to the universe) the better you got at it. I heard one guy who I am sure was full of shit about so many things telling me that and that when we have been around for awhile, we understand more about God. I am here to tell you, no, he was wrong. We just become more able to accept that we can't understand completely what the power is that we call on but as long as it keeps working, like the old adage, "If it's not broken, don't fix it!"
Sometimes it saddens me that so many people I know can only find their higher power through Abrahamic religions that are so wrought with fallacies, hate, and steeped in ancient bronze age mythology. They spew all this language that means something to them while they are somewhat self deluded. I have written about that, and I can logically prove that there is no difference between what some people call "having faith" and "self-delusion". I am not saying the self delusion doesn't work, it does for some. Maybe some people need to be self deluded, I did at first. I was wholly committed to the Holy Bible teachings at one point in my life but so much of scripture is convoluted to serve the deepest dark parts of humans that it is obvious much of it was about profit shares and rationalisations for killing, slavery, rape, misogyny, and all sorts of other xenophobic and homophobic human character flaws. A perfect deity that wasn't full of human emotion would never tell someone how to kill their children or bother to communicate with people in oral ways, or perhaps at all, since we are so prone to misinterpret or reinterpret everything we think we know for the sake of being "righteous".
By religious standards, I am an atheist because I don't believe in religious, dogmatic, pagan like deities. But, as I said, I do have a higher power. I am convinced that the there is a central life force in every belief from every type of enlightened group of people for a reason, but it is not some old man who sits in a throne in the clouds, keeping score, and no one is even.
He doesn't throw lightening bolts (That was Zeus) or cast plagues and doesn't start wars. A spiritual being wouldn't need a sex organ or even a sexual identity so it isn't male or female. A force that is like the life force in all of us, connected, and the closest description I can think of is the thought of Kundalini energy but even that doesn't cover it.
To say that it is in all things is a simplification but the only way I as a human being can recognize it is to watch everything, all people, plants, trees, animals, fish, birds, rocks, earth, water, sky, and nature, It is in everything and we are all connected.
We can't control it through prayer. That would be God doing our will. We are taught that selfish prayer (praying for something you yourself wants) doesn't work. That prayer of meditation, if done properly and long enough, I can find a way to ask to align my will with it, because it doesn't have a man-like will, it just is. That is the closest way that I can describe my higher power.

Friday, December 25, 2015

I had something interesting happen the other day. Last Monday I was doing my weekly volunteer gig at Habitat For Humanity when I noticed they had given me a Christmas card and a bag with a present in it. One of the office people from construction asked me, "Oh, does it offend you when someone tells you Merry Christmas?" I had to think a minute. I am quite outspoken about not being a member of an Abrahamic religion and so I realize some people don't know how someone who is Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, etc. might feel about everyone sharing their holiday and this is the first time anyone has asked me this.
I like the holiday because it is about sharing and caring and remembering our family and friends in a small token. Although I don't celebrate the holiday in my home, lots of Americans do, including people who are my family and friends. I like the spectacle of the holiday. I love the music, having been raised in the Methodist church as a child, I was even in the choir as a young teenager. Some songs like the Ave Maria chorus make me get misty. I am not offended by you celebrating a holiday and wishing me a merry day of food, music, generosity, and happiness. I think that describes it.
I do not like people shoving their religious holidays down everyone's throats. As a child in grammar school I had to follow and recite Christian prayers, led by our teachers, It occurs to me that the Jewish kids, Islamic kids, Buddhist kids, Atheist kids, etc. were forced to say prayers from the bible. That was the reason prayer being led by one teacher, force on children, was the reason for the change in our laws.
One of my cousins, being older and believing she was wiser, went into a tirade on season because the kids at her children's school were not allowed to have a "Christmas Pageant" and Christmas parties in the classrooms because that had become too much of a sociopolitical argument over whose religion was going to celebrate and when. I asked her why she thought it was okay to shove Christmas down everyone else's throats.
To those of you who don't believe that is a standard in the United States, I ask you. When you drive downtown in December, where are the Jewish, Islamic, or other religions' decorations hanging from the light poles? If you have to be selfish and push your beliefs on me, I find that offensive, but if you wish me a happy day based on this time of year, THANK YOU. (I am finished on that subject)

About Me

I am an Arizona native, born and raised in Phoenix, although I have lived for brief times in other places. I am what one would call a Centrist. I don't believe in radical left or right stances and refuse to let the low information, regressive, right wing people call me "liberal" since that would be left of reality based on opinion, and I believe in facts and research of evidence.